About ZDoom

ZDoom is a family of enhanced port of the Doom engine to modern operating systems. It runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X, and adds new features not found in the games as originally published by id Software.

Older ZDoom ports may be used and distributed free of charge. No profit may be made from the sale of it. GZDoom and its descendants from version 3.0.0 on are licensed GPL and are subject to the terms and restrictions of the new license.

ZDoom was originally created by Randi Heit using id Software's and various others' sources. Its successor ports GZDoom and QZDoom are now maintained by Christoph Oelckers, Braden Obrzut, Rachael Alexanderson, and Magnus Norddahl.

Why would I want to use ZDoom instead of regular Doom?

Consider all these features that ZDoom has that are not found in the standard Doom originally released by id:

It runs well under all modern versions of Windows, from Windows XP to the new Windows 10. If you have Mac or Linux, it works with that too.

Can play all Doom engine games, including Ultimate Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, and more.

Supports all the editing features of Hexen. (ACS, hubs, new map format, etc.)

Up to 8 player network games using UDP/IP, including team-based gameplay.

Support for the Bloodbath announcer from the classic Monolith game Blood.

Walk over/under monsters and other things.

With thanks to...

id Software / John Carmack

These are the people who developed Doom and later released the source code for the Linux port. Without them, there would be no ZDoom. Some of the functions from their Quake2 game DLL source were also used.

Raven Software

Portions of Heretic and Hexen were used in ZDoom.

Team TNT / Chi Hoang

Responsible in one way or another for Boom, which provided a significant codebase for ZDoom. Information about Boom can be found on the Doom Wiki at DoomWiki.org.

Xaser Acheron

Development and support of the new website.

Rachael Alexanderson

Creator of the QZDoom source port which merged in Norddahl's True-color software renderer in with GZDoom. Keeps ZDoom.org afloat and helped spearhead the recent site upgrades.

Sebastien Bacquet

Created qmus2mid which was used to determine the structure of DOOM's MUS lumps so that the game would have music.

Benjamin Berkels

Major contributions to GZDoom's model code, and also helped integrate the texture resampling code. Also the lead developer of Zandronum (and formerly, Skulltag), from which some code has been used.

Brad Carney

Creator of the Skulltag source port, whose code has also been used in many places throughout ZDoom.

Creator of the SMMU and Chocolate Doom source ports, allowed code from both of them to be used in ZDoom.

Lee Killough

For all his brilliant work on both Boom and later MBF. Portions of MBF were used in ZDoom, primarily to fix Boom bugs.

Bernd Kreimeier

Packaged up id's Linux code for the initial source release.

Greg Lewis

Released his DeHackEd source, without which adding DeHackEd support would have been much harder.

Alexey Lysiuk

Creator of the original GZDoom-Mac project, which was later ported over and merged into to GZDoom proper. He has been instrumental on assisting with fixing a lot of GZDoom bugs, particularly with non-Windows platforms, and also for the wtfi.exe utility which allows GZDoom to run properly with the broken drivers on older Intels on Windows 10.

Magnus Norddahl

Creator of QZDoom's true-color software renderer, as well as adding in post-processing and flexible window scaling support to both ZDoom and GZDoom.

Christoph Oelckers

Most of the DECORATE support as well as numerous bug fixes. Also, for the OpenGL renderer, as well as advancing ZScript along to the point where it is today.

Chris Robinson

Maintainer of OpenAL-Soft, and developer and maintainer of ZDoom's OpenAL backend support. He is a big part of the reason why GZDoom was able to transition away from FMod and go fully GPL compliant, today.

Ken Silverman

Creator of the "Build" Engine, and for giving special permission to relicense his voxel code as GPL for GZDoom's software renderer.